S2E6: Courage Means You Might Mess Up

Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s moving beyond it and taking a leap- even though you might mess up. In this episode, Norma Wong and Ariel Jacobson discuss courage and what it truly takes to make a courageous leap. Drawing on history and personal stories, including ancestors fleeing melting ice, Queen Liliʻuokalani's choice not to fight an unwinnable battle, and a Lebanese grandmother’s role in supporting community and sustenance, they show that courage involves evaluating risks and moving beyond fear in order to move toward interdependent thriving.

In this episode:

• Why endless resources don’t necessarily end in big leaps,
• Moving from advocacy to governance, and the courage it takes to actually do the thing you're calling for
• What makes something a leap instead of a step- and how to know when you're leaping too small, or not at all
• The Celtic "Prayer of Approach" and why we need to all practice this together.
• A reading from When No Thing Works.

REFERENCED

• When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse, Norma Wong

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:01

Aloha, I'd like to read to you a bit from Who Are Becoming Matters. This would be chapter three, page 16, about halfway down. In the human quotient needed to take the productive leap when the juncture arrives where change is possible and therefore begins. There are a handful of essential characteristics. Courage is very near the top of the list. Without courage, no big leaps can be made, period. And leap require risk taking. Without risk, there can be no big change, significant pivot, dramatic expansion of our understanding. And risk is very difficult to hold and navigate for the faint of heart, or the fool who doesn't understand or perhaps care about impacts and dangers. Which is to say, a person who is blind to peril imperils others and is therefore not a courageous personal. Not for the faint of heart. And that will be the topic of our conversation today at the Horizon Story. Who do we need to become to step up even in the collapse? That's the essential question. And we can talk about courage, but courage is a thing that is a, well, it's a way in which we are moving beyond the fear that we have. Now, paradoxically, it's easier for people who have nothing at all to be courageous. And that's because they feel that they have no other choice. You know, right now there are some courageous moves that we made by certain members of the of Congress and the US Senate. And the name that they're giving to these folks is Y-O-L-O, right? The YOLO Club, right? And what are they talking about that? They're talking about you only live once. Okay, you only live once. Now, as it turns out, that's a truism for all of us. We only have one life. But faced with the potential of having to put ourselves at risk, we could choose that because we only have one life, we're gonna play it cautiously. That's what we're gonna do. Now, does everybody need to take a risk? No, that's not how we're built, after all. But some percentage of every community, some percentage of the human race needs to take a risk. That's just the circumstances we're in. I'm reminded that there were humans living at the end of the last ice age. And at that moment, when they didn't know what the world would be like if there was no ice, people had to take a risk about what it is that they were seeing. They could see the melting occur. And by the way, the earth was heating up much faster than it is right now. And they were seeing the world collapsing because it was melting away, and they had to take a risk. Now, there was nothing at that moment that would tell them, for example, oh, we've done these studies, and what these studies show is that we have another 40 years or another 60 years, another 100 years. They had no data. All they had was the data that they could see with their own eyes wide open, that they would go to bed at night, and when they woke in the morning from wherever it was they're sleeping, on the ground, in the places that they were, that the world was melting even before their very eyes, and they had to take some risks. They couldn't stay in place. They went to higher ground, they went as fast as they could, and they went fast enough so that they could rebuild on a higher ground that which they had on the lower ground, and so that they could stay on that higher ground for a while, and they needed to do that. They needed to stay for a very long while. They needed to stay because the land basically melted and everything rose. Lakes appeared where there were no lakes before, oceans became evident, and they had to wait until all of that water, or most of that water, or at least enough of that water, subsided before they could come back to lower ground. So they had to build a life elsewhere. They had to build a life. That most of those folks were common to all of us. It was that far back in human history. So we have that buried deep somewhere, the courage to move quickly and to rebuild as we go. And we're calling upon that courage right now. Because we have to make the biggest of leaps. Without courage, no big leaps can be made. And courage is facing the possibility of those leaps, knowing that we are not sure of what is in the in-between space. What do I mean by the in-between space? Okay, when you take a leap, you leave certainty. But you always want to leap somewhere. You always want to know where it is that you're leaping. Any parent will tell that to their child as soon as their child is going to launch themselves off of the couch, right? You know, look where you're going, right? Look where you're going. Leaping, right? Totally consequential. Walking across the street, consequential too, right? So you look both ways before you cross the street, you look what part of the street you're going to cross, you know that you want to cross the street before you cross the street. But even more consequential if you make that leap. And so to land somewhere means to know the story of the place that you're landing. And in some ways, that should make the leap less risky. But it is a risk nonetheless, and nothing large can be gained without taking that leap. In the place that I live, in which we are used to a long, long history of people who are advocates of one thing or another. You know, well before I was born, well before my parents' parents' parents were born, we had we have a history of that. We have a history of people essentially standing up and saying the thing. We had people of that sort before we call them advocates, or before we call them protesters, or before we call them anything at all. We have a history of that. And we also have a history of like if you're going to do something with that, with what it is that people stand up for, then it you have to move beyond what we call that first stage of courage. You have to move into the part where you're putting the pieces together for people, explaining how and why and what's important. And when they look at you and they go, I want to be with you, but I don't know what to do. If you're unable to describe what it is that should be done, then you're only going to be about your voice. You're only going to be about that. People think that there's a lot of courage needed to stand up and say things that are inconvenient. And that is definitely so. But there's another layer of courage beyond that. And that is the courage to not only talk about what you want, but to step into the doingness of it. And you take a big risk. You take a really big risk. The risk is you might mess up. You might mess up like the people that you're criticizing right now, right? You might not be able to do the thing. And so it might be safer for you to stay on the ground of just being the advocate. And so there's courage in being the advocate, and then there's a courage about taking the leap, moving from advocacy to governance. And boy, we need some governance right now. People who are in the government need governance right now. I am not sure whether or not it's going to be easier for people who are in government to be able to come back into being able to govern, or whether it's going to be easier from the outside in. But irrespective of it, it's going to take risk taking and it's going to take courage. And part of the courage is going to be about whether people who see themselves at odds would be able to persuade the other. Not beat the other one down until they submit, but actually persuade. Persuade them. Actually bring them on board. Do that type of work. Take the risk of doing that kind of work, of describing how it is that we need to move from wherever we are to another. I'm just going to say his name and then I'm going to call him up and tell him that I said his name. So when he hears that I said his name, that he won't be surprised that I said his name. So his name is Poca Lai Nui. And I've known this guy a long time. I knew him when he wasn't, that wasn't his name. That's so long ago. And Poca Lainui has a very radical notion about independent governance. But Pokalai Nui will always take the time to try to explain it, to try to describe it, to try to put it in terms that you might understand, to try to actually figure things out. Now he will say he's not a good implementer. So what he's trying to do is he's trying to actually describe to people who he believes have the right heart to implement, that there is a better idea. And that better idea is something that they're afraid of. But if they only knew what that idea was about, they wouldn't be as afraid of it anymore. And he will just go person to person in trying to persuade people. And he takes that risk and he treats people well. So courage is not just about like being in your face, right? Your idea should be as big an idea as it can be. But can you meet another human on a human-to-human basis? I learned a lot about independent governance just by listening to the fascinating ways in which Pocah and people that POCA had conversation with would unravel and unravel and unravel and then put it all back together again. And they're taking the time to do that. The most radical of ideas take time. And we have to start. We have to start as soon as we can. Actually, many moments. Liliu Okalani was the last native ruler of an entirely indigenous government flying an indigenous flag here in Hawaii. Not the last Native ruler, period, because we've had Native rulers, Native leaders who have taken office and have led all of our peoples, native or not, under other flags, territory of Hawaii, the state of Hawaii. Flags come and go. And that is something that Lili Ukalani swallowed at a very difficult moment. The people that were in her cabinet, who were not native, had a different idea about governance. And they essentially overthrew the government. It was a coup. And they overthrew that government, and there was a threat of violence at that moment, helped by a cadre of Marines, American Marines, who were in the harbor at that time. And Lili Okalani would have known that just a few years prior, there were several large-scale massacres of indigenous peoples in the continent of the U.S. She knew what American power could do if Americans wanted territory. The news would have come across the ocean. And she had a difficult decision to make. And taking arms and fight would have been unmatched. They would not have the firepower or the strategic advantage in this particular instance. And so she took a big risk. And the risk that she took is that she would save her lives of her people and take the risk that she would be able to untangle the political situation because she believed that it was these Americans were rogue and that the government of America would be able to hear her cause, hear the cause of the Native peoples. And she took that risk. And she stood and she watched the flag come down. You know, the governor that I work for, John Waihei, he tells the story of his father's father. And the story of his father's father is that he lived at that moment. And at that moment on the big island of Hawaii, he walked from where they lived on the coast to the government building, the Hawaiian government building, to watch the flag come down. And he did that because he said, if Lili Okalani can stand there and watch the flag come down, certainly I can too. This momentous periods in history, what would you do? Now, she never saw that as a capitulation. She saw that as saving the lives of her people, which at that moment had already been decimated. They're already down to, oh, más o menos about 100,000, 125,000 people, from a height of 750 to 800,000 people less than 100 years prior, decimated by the onslaught of people who came to Hawaii who were not indigenous, who brought their disease, but also people just died because they could not see a future, because they felt the displacement. And she understood at that moment that if her people rose and were all killed, then what is it that you were saving? What is it that you were saving? But she also in that moment reminded the people over and over again, sometimes underground, sometimes above ground. In the underground way, she would write songs because she was a composer, she was a songwriter. And she would write songs that would remind the people of the resilience of the place of Hawaii, and they needed to be like that. They needed to be like the Opihi that would hold on and actually prosper, get fat and delicious on the side of the rocks when they're hit by the waves each time. Reminded of that. To be in this place and to love this place would mean that you would have to thrive, not just survive. And that was their job. Her job was to see whether or not they could work out the politics. And their job was to make sure that they lived every day in a way that they moved closer and closer to thriving. They held on to that. They kept that. In that way, very much like the story that I just read about this Lebanese grandmother. One million Lebanese have been displaced internally within their country because of the bombing that is going on right now, the strife. And so they've had to move from their homes that have been destroyed or are no longer safe. And they're in these vast internal refugee camps, still in their own country, but entirely displaced. And this Lebanese grandmother, faced with the prospect of standing in a long line to get rations, and maybe when they got to the top of the line, there would be none left, decided, well, I have some flour. I know how to make flatbread. I brought my iron that we would make the flatbread on. I took that out of my home and I traveled with it because it's so important. And I'll just make flatbread over the fire. And soon she was making two or three hundred flatbread a day and just giving them away, especially to the children of that place. And soon people actually joined her. They said, I have some flour, I have a bit of yeast, I have oil, I have sitar, I have a little bit of the meat pieces that you could just put on top. I have hours I can give you. I can volunteer my sons who will come and will help you out. And now they're making two or three thousand flatbread a day in this one place right outside of this grandmother's tent. And she makes extra coffee so that people come and she says, Come sit down, come talk story. She probably says something other than talk story, but if she was a Hawaii person, she would say talk story. And on her table, she always has a fresh flower. The notion that in the most dire of circumstances that you would move towards thriving speaks to the courage of you facing that. You face not all that is happening on the defense. You go on the offense. Okay, sometimes it can be, but if you're going to do that, it has to be part of a larger strategy. It has to be an offense within a defense within an offense. Very difficult to stay on your heels and get pushed back into the corner, even if you say that you're fighting very aggressively. To take the offense, to choose life and thriving is courage. Little Kalani left us with some advice, explicitly, more explicit than the songs that she wrote and left to us, although she felt that those songs would endure because they would be within our experience, and we would be able to bring up the energy of it and the spirit of it anytime we sang those songs. I think she's probably correct in that regard. They didn't have 105.1 back in the day, but her songs are still being sung on 105.1. Entirely new generations are hearing about that, absorbing that. But just in case, she left actual words, but she left them behind with her Hanai, her adopted daughter, to be read only after she passed. And in that passage, she essentially said to us, the succeeding generations, you must never fail to act because you fear that you will fail. You must never fail to act because you fear that you will fail. Courage is facing that fear. We don't know. Nothing is certain. When Qi lost the bid for the nation to be reclaimed, and Hawaii became a territory, and becoming a territory meant that if you were a male and you had part ownership of land, that under the US Constitution you're eligible to vote. Lidio Kalani went door to door and she urged everyone who would be eligible to vote. She urged them to vote. She said, we would not wish that to be part of this country, but now that we have the power to vote, we must use it. We must use it. We must take our case forward. And in taking our case forward, what will we concentrate on? We will feed our people. We will give them shelter. We will make sure that they have clean water, that the water is not stolen, that the water is not used for purposes that would take it away from the people, that there will be health care for our people, that we'll be able to bring our people back. Because if the people are not living well, if the people are not prospering, not through the wealth of money, but prospering in terms of knowing who it is that we are and what we're about, and our responsibility to each other and to the land, then all is lost. By the way, we could still be flying the flag of Hawaii. And if we forget all those things, then we will have lost. So facing the fear of a potential failure, to have the courage to act, to take that step, to meet those needs with our own sweat and equity to do that. To do that. Sometimes that means that the action that we take will be small. And if it is small, let it be meaningful. And perhaps we will join with a few other people. And there's a little bit of a well, it's not small, but it's a medium kind of a thing. And if it's in the medium kind of thing, then let it be consequential. And if we are to go big, then let it be transformational, not just like make big talk, make big action, you know, make big noise, you know, do all those things. Let the big noise be only the thing that occurs before the real work occurs. Everything consequential to make sure that our people are eating, they have shelter, the water is clean, they have health care. And today in modernity we need energy. And therefore we must be concerned about that. Whew, friends. We're gonna take a little bit of a breather. Then my friend Ariel is going to come back, and uh we're gonna be the two people that are not for the fate of heart. See you in a bit. Hello friends, we're back with Ariel. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 31:39

I'm doing well. It's so wonderful to be back. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_04 31:42

Thank you for coming back.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

And thank you for telling those stories about these very consequential moments in the trajectory of Hawaii. Um and I want to come to some more storytelling about uh taking courageous leaps. But before we do that, I want to get a little bit more into actually kind of breaking down what we mean by a leap, just so that we really land that. Uh leaps need to land. So I think one of the questions I had, you gave an example of maybe crossing the street, and um we may experience it as taking many steps across the street, and yet we traverse some direction, we're moving forward. Um, and you're intentional in calling it, you know, a courageous leap, not a courageous risk, right? That's right. So, what is it about calling it a leap? Can you just break it down for us a little bit more?

SPEAKER_04 32:38

Okay. So if you are uh like uh engaged in something, whatever it might be, and you say, Okay, um, I'm going to I'm gonna do more of this, but essentially it's the same thing. That's not a leap. Okay, so what a leap is, is you're leaving the boundary of what you know or how it is that you've always done it, and you're moving consequentially into something else. And to make you know more plain, it's like at some point, even though there can be small leaps and big leaps, uh at some point, if the leap is too small, it's not a leap, it's just a step. Okay. Right? It's just a step. Which is why when you talk about like going across the street, well, those are essentially many steps. And by the way, when you start walking in a direction, keep walking. Okay, don't stop, stand in the middle of the street, but you actually end up putting yourself at greater risk. Okay. So, what would it mean if you're going to uh like uh get from here to where you always plan to go, but to take a leap? It would be don't take so many small steps to get there. Uh don't uh uh come back and forth in a loop because you're in an endless process around what it is doing. Don't say that, well, I know that what I'm doing hasn't worked so far, but if you just resource me, if you make if I if you make sure that I have the right budget, I I I know that we'll I know that we'll get there. Okay. And uh and there the other is thing that uh that people might conflate, okay, is they might conflate, oh what a leap is, is you're just doing everything really big. Like, you know, for example, um uh you you're going to uh uh put your you're gonna fund a rocket, and you know that there is a 75% chance that it's going to blow up, but you uh do it anyway because, well, what the hell? We have the money and we'll learn something from that failure, right? From that failure. Okay. That right, you're getting close to the territory where that's not courage anymore, that's recklessness. And it's the kind of recklessness you can do if you have an endless amount of resources and endless amount of money. Okay. And we'd say, then if you if you get into that mindset and that way of thinking, then among other things, you'd say, well, I can only go big if I am, if I if I have all the if I have a lot of money. Okay. And so I think that's I think that's like a that's a false strategy in that regard and shouldn't be called a big leap.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Yeah, yeah. That's a really helpful way of thinking about it because I think for uh listeners, uh everybody can relate actually to probably some leap that we've taken in our lives. Like maybe it's a big move that we made of very long distance. Maybe it's that we've decided to join a new community or leave a community of origin, right? That that can be a leap. Um, I think sometimes when we think about leaps, what is bringing up for me is if you're telling a story of something that has transpired and you and you say, Well, that was the moment I knew everything would be different, right? That was probably a leap. That was probably a leap if you say that. That was probably a leap. Um it might be something like to your examples that you've invested a lot of time and a lot of your own energy into, but it's time to move a different direction and let go of it.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

And so the leap is to set it aside.

SPEAKER_04 36:45

Yes, a leap generally uh has a transition associated with it.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 36:50

So there was the the before and the after.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

Okay. Okay, right.

SPEAKER_04 36:55

Before the leap, this is who I was, this is what I did, this is what I knew. Now I have a sense of even though I am the same person, I am not the same person, right? What I know, what I see, what I'm capable of, right, what I feel would be possible. So sometimes a leap is about a leap of possibility. But if you stay there and wait too long before you implement into that possibility, you'll lose ground and you will no longer be in a stance of a leap.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

So you can't always you want to know where you're gonna land, but you can't wait until you know everything about how it's gonna unfold. There's some uncertainty baked in.

SPEAKER_04 37:46

Yes. And part of that is is that the bigger that something is, okay, uh, by definition, it will be not about ground that has been walked before. It isn't about things that have been done before, right? There will be this notion of it getting built as you go versus everything having been determined, and then you step into it. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

So would you be willing to share an example, I think, from your own experience, something in your life and work that kind of would tell us a little bit more about what these leaps are about?

SPEAKER_04 38:27

Well, you know, uh when I first ran for office, that was a leap. I was someone who was uh engaged in the political arena, but very much um uh from the support side or uh from the um idea side, but not about you know putting uh myself on the line. I was gonna say putting my ass on the line, right? So uh not from that perspective, okay. And so uh running for office was a leap. Um not running for office again was a leap. Okay, and understanding that that was not about a retreat, but about moving on to something else, okay, right, which is important not just as a way you frame it, but in actuality, for it not to be like a smaller version of yourself, right? Okay, yeah. Uh a leap for me uh was um oh a leap for me was the moment in which I understood that uh staying in college and getting my degree was not going to be as useful as what was going on in my community at that time. Okay, and taking the risk of going down a path that certainly uh had many risks, right? Uh, you know, clearly the risk of um people who wanted to me to uh you know to graduate from college, I had to risk their disappointment basically of that, right? I had to make a leap.

SPEAKER_03 40:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:12

Once making a leap, you you cannot look back. So you can't have like a regret, right, with respect to it, right? You have to actually keep on going.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

You know.

SPEAKER_04 40:25

I certainly took a leap at the point that my teacher had a notion before I had a notion, right, that uh I would be any good at teaching. I was certainly ready and willing, and yes, comfortable in just being a student. And I would be happy to continue to be a student even after he passed. He would still be my teacher as an ancestor, and I would be happy to be a student in that regard. And when he, you know, like had that conversation with me, you know, it's like there was this moment in which I literally felt experientially of the ground like emptying out from under me. Like I'm standing on the side of a cliff. Yeah, right? Okay, right, okay. I'm standing on the side of the cliff, feeling equally scared, shedless, and thrilled at the same time.

unknown 41:25

Right.

SPEAKER_04 41:25

Okay. Yeah. And I think big leaps should have that. It was like very similar to the leap when I ran for office, similar to the leap, right? All of the leaps in my personal life have had a similar feeling associated with it. Okay. Um, have I mentioned that doing this podcast is thinking that, but I didn't want to say it. Right? Okay, you know, like, you know, nothing adds up to my being uh my doing the podcast. Like nothing is rational. So there's something about a leap also that although uh you could put a purpose and line up the purpose and line up a strategy associated with it, it does not mean that it will be rational.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

Yeah, you know, I think in what you're saying, um there's an aspect of, you know, when you follow the courage, you follow the line of courage and that goes through the fear, um, there's kind of leaping toward uh more of yourself, right? That is yet to be. And so kind of coming back to the who we are becoming matters, right? Um, but there's also an aspect where it sounds like sometimes you might be able to say, oh, the stars aligned and at that moment. And sometimes maybe the stars are not aligning and you're just going for it because um that's what's required in that moment.

SPEAKER_04 42:58

If you are paying attention to the world generally, then gee, right, the threshold in which great things can happen, will keep opening, closing, opening, closing, opening, closing, opening, closing. Okay. And if you're paying attention, right, then you can literally see and feel that opening in front of you. And then the question is who will walk through? Will you be the person along with other people, right, who will walk through, right? Yeah. So, you know, uh, is luck involved? Yes, there is some luck involved. Uh, and you can screw up luck by hesitating. Right. Yeah. You could do that. It runs out. It yeah, you could you could uh ring wring out all the joy and possibility in the luck by hesitating and over processing and trying to have everything perfect before you before.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

So then how do you not misread signals? Like I think one of the things that we may be gauging in understanding if there's an opening is do we have the right people to be with in moving through that opening? And yet it doesn't mean that we're always going to agree with all the people we're moving through into that opening, right? So what does it mean to move into a leap together when also we may disagree at the same time?

SPEAKER_04 44:28

Well, to align at the level of purpose and possibility, and to align at the level of one human being to another, right? Belly button to belly button, to have like the mutuality of respect, right? Um, you know, Punani Burchis, who I talk of a lot, right, uh who's now an ancestor, she introduced me to this particular poem. And where she came across this poem was at a gathering that the Dalai Lama had of people who were in uh on different sides of conflict in their various countries, uh, who had an intention of something else occurring besides the conflict, besides the violence. And what they were they met many times, and at each one of those people were asked to bring a reading that maybe that they wrote or something that was a favorite of theirs that would set the intention, right? And among those was the this one. It's uh uh it's a it's a Celtic, uh, ancient Celtic um poem uh that is sometimes known as a prayer of approach.

SPEAKER_03 45:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 45:50

Can I read it to you? Yeah, I'd love that. I honor your gods, I drink at your well. I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place. I have no cherished outcomes. I will not negotiate by withholding. I am not subject to disappointment. Now here's the deal. That has to be everyone's, not just one person's, right? Or it doesn't work. If there are ten people who have an intention of a particular purpose, in order to get to this level of connection, where they would mutually honor each other's gods, drink at each other's wells, never trying to actually uh be in a place where they're they're guarding their emotional possibility, right? In other words, not to be easily hurt, right? To not have an outcome that would be so uh special to them, right, rather than to the we, that they uh would not put all in into that outcome, right? To uh not withhold something uh just to get along, right? And understanding that the road that we build that is worth building, that there will be many ways in which we will move forward and move backward, move forward, move backward, move forward, move backward, go in a loop, have to go around a mountain, through you know, through the brambles and dig tunnels, right? And so you cannot be easily disappointed, right? Or you will stop. So to have that mutually would make the we much more courageous than the I.

SPEAKER_01 48:09

Yeah, and and it brings up for me the courage, and maybe one of the uh specs that you've brought up previously in these conversations around this this courage lives in the gut, right? It doesn't live in the heart necessarily. You know, there's a little courage in the heart too, but um that it lives in the gut, and um it's apt that this poem was brought into a space, right, where there was uh people coming together in the midst of conflict. So the question that came up for me is, you know, what is it about this moment? We've talked about collapse and um, you know, systems no longer working the way that we need them to. What is it about this moment that makes leaps uh possible and uh in fact maybe a ripe time for leaps?

SPEAKER_04 48:59

So I would say that if we had our eyes wide open and if we had our guts available to us, that we would understand in that place below our belly button that we have no choice. Okay, and that uh to meet this particular moment would be about the historic contribution of the generation of the people who live at this moment again.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

You know, small stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Well, good thing we have each other, yeah? Good thing we have each other. Friends, we're gonna take a break and we'll be right back.

SPEAKER_04 49:52

Who are we becoming and towards what end? And what is it gonna take in order for us to make the collective leap, not just you know, individuals one by one. It's like it's gonna take something more than um than we thought that we had. And that's kind of the point. Because if we were just bringing the regular stuff, then I would say we would not be in as big a vat of kimchi as we are right now. We would have seen the problems uh more clearly and we would have done something about it. We let a lot of things slide. And when I say we, I mean we. We're all complicit in that regard. We all had uh we all had a part in it. And now we all have a part as well. Not as individuals as much as peoples as groups. They could be small, they could grow into larger groups, but eventually, if we don't stand for the possibility of humanity, uh then all of our prospects will become smaller and smaller and smaller, and we will devolve rather than evolve. So it is true we're becoming uh does matter. It's a wholeness thing, courage, right? It's like when you're able to meet fear, then you are calling upon the part of you that is actually more whole, W-H-O-L-E. Even if you feel a puka, you know, an H-O-L-E, a whole, even if you feel that way, that there's something else that is arising, and possibility is is its name. In uh Who We're Becoming Matters, the book, there is a uh chapter called Wholeness is not accommodation. It's chapter eight. And I'd just like to read to you a little bit of them. Our Kuliana sacred, mutual responsibility. In this endeavor to know wholeness, not as purity, how can it be static, devoid of dirt and stain? Only the equity of sweat, hard work, will bring us safely to the other side. The other side beyond turmoil, separation, erasure, yes, sanctity, but not righteous purity, as much hard work needs to be done. People fed, streams cooled and cleaned, everything in between interrupted. For we do not yet really know wholeness in this fully embraced way, being neither on top nor bottom, this side or that, replacing them with us will not the we make. We the ancestors of descendants yet to come, reaching farther back than memories' dreams, embracing original not knowing in making this leap. We create the event horizon of the whole much more than accommodation. Don't you think? Don't you think? Thank you, friends, for joining us at the Horizon Podcast. And next time, uh Lehu will be with me and he will help us uh close out the season. We might even get Ariel to come back too. Let's see. You'll find out at the same time I will. The Horizon Story Podcast is produced by Bryson Ho and Sarah Demares de Rivera. Hosted and written by me, Norma Wong. Executive producer Na'alehu Anthony, featuring Ariel Jacobson, for Collective Caceleration, Kelly Miller, for OEV TV, Ken Sato, Wesley Kealoha, Courtney Leong, Jeff Lee, and Ivy Lagavaghan. For Pa'akai Communications, Jamila Silver, Diana Hahn, Pearl Thule, Christine Matsuda, Hair and Makeup by Melody Levy, Ma Halo to Kalihi, the land of my birth, ancestors, teachers, collaborators, and friends, Rosie Abriam for the support, and Scott Nine and Taj James for the encouragement. The Horizon Story is brought to you by OEVTV, copyright by Collective Acceleration. Follow us on social at the Horizon Story. Questions to hello at thehorizonstory.com. Visit us where you find your favorite podcast or at thehorizonstory.com.